


Lost Scholar

by Skeren



Category: Trinity Blood
Genre: Backstory, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-24
Updated: 2016-01-24
Packaged: 2018-05-15 21:34:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 990
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5801026
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Skeren/pseuds/Skeren
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>One Scholar paid attention to the value of technology when the war started to ruin everything.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lost Scholar

**Author's Note:**

> Written April of 2009.

It wasn’t fair, and nothing anyone ever said would make it be so.

Life just didn’t happen that way.

He looked in windows sometimes, when he lived on the streets, and saw things that nobody wanted to see, and nobody wanted to be seen. He didn’t look away because looking away meant that maybe, if he didn’t see it, he would end up living it instead.

He never ever claimed that he saw anything, but he remembered, so when something like that came up again... well, he was prepared.

So no, nothing was fair. In his case, life was a cold miserable thing, and he watched as the city he’d once loved was destroyed, falling to pieces because of greed, then later, fear. 

Because people were idiots who tampered with things they shouldn’t.

He knew, without knowing how he knew, that he was watching everything change, and felt it in his bones well before he realized things he wished that he hadn’t thought of. 

There were hunters out there, and there were people who would destroy all they feared just to keep a balance that didn’t exist. It wasn’t just one side doing it. The Vampires were afraid. The humans were afraid.

Atrocities happened behind closed doors because nobody was willing to admit that their fear was driving them all mad. 

As he got older, he realized some things. 

He’d never been a morning person, and this war took him underground more often than not in the daylight hours. He was a technician, not a fighter. 

He also found himself aching for things he didn’t understand, until one day he did, and he was sure, completely sure, that he wished he hadn’t found out. He wasn’t on the human side anymore, but he certainly wasn’t siding with the Vampires.

Siding with the Vampires was a good way to turn up in those mysterious body counts that never seemed to have a source, but the humans were all too smug about.

No, instead he kept to the shadows, slowly squirreling away bits of technology as other parts were destroyed, as places where information was kept were turned into useless nothings.

War destroyed the world, or at least, the world as he knew it, and turned it into a hellish place where everyone was afraid.

The angels... they turned on their humans, or at least, that was the rumor. He’d been listening for years, following the news, keeping his head above water, and he knew it wouldn’t be long before things took another new twist.

The twist would, of course, make nothing fair, but it would, maybe, make a false calm so everyone could recoup their losses.

It was worth a hope, but not worth any faith. 

So he watched as the world changed. Computers fell out of favor. Who had time to learn how to use them? Medicine became the ultimate practice, as nobody had time for video games. Communication, well, that was most important in small groups, where access would actually reach once the satellites proved to be useless under the haze of dust in the sky.

So he watched, patiently, until one day a girl came to him, a small mechanical device in her hands, and she asked him what it did.

He, of course, told her. She couldn’t have been more than ten, not by looks alone, but her green eyes were very sharp.

It took him some time for him to figure out that the little girl really wasn’t at all as young as she looked.

It also took a bit of a temper fit in which he realized that she was perfectly fine in daylight but had teeth no less sharp than his. 

He knew her name by then, of course, as they’d traveled further away from Rome, where the humans were gathering together, and he knew her ambition to band people together.

He just hadn’t realized that she’d meant vampires. 

He also hadn’t realized that she was quite serious about this whole thing.

She wanted to _make_ things fair. Novel as that was. He had grown up in bad places, and returned to them when he was older and fortunes turned wretched for everyone. 

He was in his sixties and looked like he was in his twenties. She was almost as old as he was. 

She’d outlive him. And if she looked like that forever, he wouldn’t see her dreams come to anything.

So he helped. First was an identity that would successfully cloak her so she _could_ have her goals, then the lure. 

The lure in the shape of a field that the two of them had been trying to piece together from his hoardings and a bit of tinkering. Okay, perhaps several years of tinkering. 

Only then did others they hadn’t already brought around start to take up the invitation. Among those was someone proposing the new name, the Methuselah.

He thought it was foolish, but others didn’t, and those others so desperately wanted to be something other than creatures of the night that they didn’t care how silly it would seem.

And the name stuck.

There was no talking people out of stupidity.

From there, it grew. That little girl slowly and meticulously made her rules. She protected humans her vampires had no desire to and taught them better. She out-strengthed them, and in many cases was more intimate with medicine and machinery than they, so they bowed.

After another many years, someone else piped up the idea of Great Mother.

That, too, stuck.

People had such a foolish penchant towards giving odd names to things that already had perfectly good ones.

But that’s the way things were.

He watched for much of his life, and helped where he could, in her goal of fairness.

In the end, he still didn’t believe he’d seen it achieved. 

But she’d tried, and he’d helped her.

And that was what marked a life well spent.


End file.
